Beauty fixes to keep the lockdown beasts at bay

(Reuters) - Extended coronavirus lockdowns do not have to mean living with hair roots showing or trying out the bowl cut at home.

Hair stylists and beauticians are getting creative during the pandemic, with emergency kits, tutorials and home deliveries as quarantines and social distancing orders stretch from weeks into months in many parts of the United States.

Amelia Edmundson, the owner of Amelia’s Hair Boutique in Beverly Hills, California, has been hand delivering her client’s color formulas with detailed instructions and is enjoying seeing the results.

“I thought it was hysterical,” she said after receiving a video of one client’s husband coloring her hair.

“Her husband put on a colors play list. And the first song in the first video was Ice-T’s ‘Colors.’ And the second song ... was, I think, Cyndi Lauper, ‘True Colors.’ And he was laughing and she was laughing. So, they were having the best time,” Edmundson said in an interview.

New Jersey hair salon owner Tina Pearson has created quarantine hair kits that cater to everything from coloring and weaves to short hair.

She is also doing virtual appointments.

“I had a client who never used a flat iron ever in her life. So, I actually mailed her a flat iron. And then we did a step-by-step. She shampooed it, a blow dry, flat iron. And she couldn’t believe how well she did in the sessions,” said Pearson.

Makeup and lifestyle vlogger Patrick Starrr, who has more than 4 million YouTube subscribers, said he worried at first that his beauty tutorials might seem insensitive during such troubled times.

But Starrr, who believes that self care is essential to mental health, said he started “adding more humor or more pizzazz ... because I think that’s what we need right now.”

A silver lining of extended self quarantine may be the chance to experiment with both hair and makeup.

Edmundson recommends being playful with hair when it gets too long to handle.

“Maybe put it in funky pony tails and go back to your child’s stage or something like that to have a little fun with it,” she said

“Practice doing eyelashes, practice doing a cut crease, smoky eye, contouring your nose or overlining your lips. All the things that you have not wanted to try because you were so intimidated to, try because no one is going to see you,” said Starrr.